Canadian radio is going hyper-niche as more and more stations flood the marketplace, resulting in a rash of new formats and headaches for the big radio owners.

In addition to a change in regulations a few years ago allowing players like Corus to have multiple stations in each market, the CRTC has issued a whopping 85 new FM radio licences since 2000. Station owners can now own up to two AM and two FM stations in some markets and three stations in others.

All of this has resulted in a country-wide game of musical formats, so to speak, with owners eliminating format duplication and repositioning stations to reach the most desirable demos. Big bucks ride on choosing the right format for the right market, and it’s a choice made increasingly complicated as new, ever-more-specialized formats emerge.

Peter Heron, VP national business development for the Radio Marketing Bureau (RMB), says it all comes down to market analysis to assess where the opportunities are and what segments are being over- or under-served. This evaluation process is covered in seminars RMB conducts on how radio stations can find the right format.

Whatever the format choice, Heron says the broadcaster has to first discover if there is enough audience to support a business. Once a successful format and brand have been established, because of owner consolidation, many of the station owners are specializing in a few formats and rolling them out across Canada.

‘If Company A has an easy-listening format and has an opportunity to do it in other markets, there’s a certain efficiency model because the legwork in building the brand has been done,’ says Heron. ‘But they have to realize there are subtle nuances on a regional basis so they can’t just take Template A and plug it into Market B and hope it works.’

Jeff Vidler, partner at Solutions Research Group in Toronto, says the first format choice for broadcasters is one that targets the 25-to-54 age group, but subsequent stations in a market can slice the radio pie finer to appeal to sub-segments of that group.

‘If you have the choice of being the number-10 station for 25- to 54-year-olds or the number-one station for 12 to 24, you’ll probably get more national ad dollars as the number-one station for the younger group. Once fragmentation gets to that level, that’s when you start making those kinds of choices,’ says Vidler.

Trying to understand some of the new formats today can be really confusing. Vidler says many of them are really marketing terms for programming that is only slightly different from standard formats.

For example, in the Toronto market, KISS, a CHR-rhythmic station, and Flow, an urban station, play a lot of the same music. Rhythmic means mainly hip hop and R&B. CHR is contemporary hit radio. So CHR-rhythmic stations would play hip hop and R&B but likely only the top hits. Rhythmic is also called urban and is open to all of the same permutations such as top hits or more hip hop and R&B.

Ten years ago, Vidler says, life was a lot simpler: All of these formats were rolled into one genre called dance and it included hip hop as well as what was then called house music or techno. They’ve branched off differently since then with hip hop and R&B as the dominant varieties and dance as a segment of pop.

He says hip hop/R&B is really the dominant format for 15- to 29-year-olds today. It has replaced alternative and more recently pop music as most popular with that age group.

Listeners 30-plus are not being ignored. BOB or ‘best of the best’ is a new format that focuses on the hits of the 1980s with dips into the best of the ’70s and the ’90s. New stations adopting that format include Rogers’ recently-launched JACK-FM in Vancouver and CHUM’s BOB-FM in Winnipeg.

Lorraine Micallef-Lupson, senior broadcast buyer at Starcom Worldwide, believes all of this segmenting makes it easier to target niche audiences for clients.

‘You don’t have to buy stations that are targeting to adults 25 to 49 or 18 to 49 any more. An 18-year-old is very different from a 49-year-old, so now that you’re cutting down that age gap, you’re able to better connect that listener with your product and brand.’

Gary Miles, CEO of the 43 station-strong Rogers radio division, says his company favours format segmentation, going after narrower age groups, perhaps skewing more male or female. He says this segmentation has moved radio from selling into marketing – providing a marketplace for advertisers with the attributes and music formats that draw a specific, loyal audience.

‘You just can’t put people into demos by age anymore. As a result, there may be fewer listeners but they’re probably more valued customers for the clients and media buyers.’

Gary Slaight, president and CEO of Standard Radio, says his company specializes in certain formats for both ease of programming and to facilitate cross-Canada buys for national advertisers.

Standard’s preferred formats include Rock, CHR, urban and its group of EZ Rock stations, but each genre is constantly being tested and tweaked for maximum performance.

‘We adjust our formats all the time. At our station in Vancouver – Z95 – for example, we used to play a lot of hip hop but somebody launched a total hip hop station so we don’t play as much. If someone wants hip hop in Vancouver, they’ll tune to the other station.’

Meanwhile over at Corus Entertainment, targeted audiences, cross-platform synergies, and national programming are driving the agenda. Corus owns a chain of 52 radio stations and last year launched Deep Sky, a new firm specializing in radio planning, national buys and the development of tailored programming.

Francesca Briggs, general manager of Deep Sky, says: ‘Contemporary hits appeals more to women. Rock appeals more to men. You have to really know your audience and be very clear and not be seduced into adding a little bit of this to get a wider demographic. If a station had some rock and some hip hop, you’re going to disappoint part of the audience either way.’

Corus has a number of stations with the same formats, says Briggs, which helps with some national programming, allowing network syndication with similar formats. For example, Corus recently broadcast a national Kyoto Accord discussion across several of its talk stations.

The Corus lineup had been primarily news/talk, rock, sports, and classic rock formats across Canada, but now it’s building a country music network to tie in with CMT, Country Music Television.

For instance, Country 95.3, which launched in Hamilton six months ago, demonstrated Corus’s cross-platform synergies when Shania Twain’s exclusive re-entry interview was done with Corus and broadcast on CMT, streamed to Corus Web sites and played on the country station.